Keith Silverman Live on Shally's Alley

December 16th, and you are live on Shally's Alley. In case you don't recognize me, I had a little bit of an accident with the barber yesterday. No, I'm just kidding. Actually, I was at our annual holiday party and the theme was rock and roll. We had the band KISS play. And so I went all in and just, you know, figured I would dress up in my '80s style punk outfit. So I committed and cut my hair off. And there we go. So I hope you like it. We'll see how long it takes to get back to normal. He seems to like it.

I love it.

So sadly, this is our last episode for the year 2020. Next Friday is actually the day before the Christmas weekend, and the Friday after that is the day before New Year's. And so a lot of folks will be out and traveling and enjoying their family and having fun. So we're going to take a pause until the first week of January. But that said, we're going to end the year year off with a blast. This is a really special guest today, my friend Keith Silverman. Keith and I met in, I want to say, 2003 or something like that. And I hired him to come to work at Google, where I was building the very first diversity sourcing team. Our job at Google was to hire, source and hire only diversity candidates. And at that time in particular, the emphasis for our group was female engineers, which were very rare at the time. There were, I believe, 15% of the computer science graduates in the, you know, in the candidate pool. Were female. I'm sure things have changed since then and I haven't kept up with the numbers. It was a very difficult challenge, I can tell you that much. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had gone to a CMU event and decided that they wanted to take a lesson from the, I think it was called Shattering the Glass Ceiling book, where they visited a guest lecturer from the author of the book who said that it's really important to represent the population that you are serving in your internal community as a company. And so they set out to increase the representation of female engineers proactively. This wasn't any kind of punitive anything. It was a proactive effort. And so they got back and they set out starting a team to do this. I was selected to lead the team and along with my friend Eric Jaquith, we were the first two to start doing this. Eric, helped set things up, and then he moved on to other contracts and, and other work. He likes to set up technology and, and kind of move on. And so I was left to build a team, and one of my first hires was Keith. I didn't know anything about Keith, but I, I do know a couple of things that were really interesting to me at the time and still continue to be interesting. One of them was Keith is a guitarist, and I don't mean like he plays guitar in, you know, his bedroom at night, you know, to like YouTube videos or not. He actually is like a legit guitarist and plays live. Now Keith, do you have any records or are you on any albums that we might know?

Yes, I have 5 albums out actually, and, uh, my stage name is Keith Andrew, keithandrewband.com. You can find me out there, uh, and keithandrew.com. I'm streaming on Spotify. Um, I've got a pretty nice worldwide listenership, which I feel quite blessed to have. And I do, uh, jazz, funk, fusion, and I also do blues. So I compose and play guitar, a little bit of keyboard. It's, it's definitely my passion, but there's some crossover. There's a lot of crossover actually into recruiting and sales that go along with the, you know, the, uh, left brain, uh, uh, left brain, right brain creative hemispheric dimension.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, well, when we met, I wasn't— I think maybe you had one album and you were playing some live gigs here and there, but I remember talking about, you know, like it's, it's, it's how you let out steam. And it wasn't really the way that you were making a living and you had been in recruiting for a while. But the second thing that I was really impressed with, we'll get back to that music thing in just a minute. The second thing was that Keith Andrew, as he referred to himself on the, on the phone when talking to candidates, has a special gift, a very special gift of let's just say gab, the gift of gab. He was spectacular, and I'm sure still is spectacular at converting candidates on the phone. So the other special skill was he was doing old-fashioned, and yes, in 2003 and 2004, it was already old-fashioned, good old telephone sourcing. And I mean, like some other names you might know out there, Connie Leducer and Maureen Sharib might come up, Sheila Greco might come up as some of the, the greats in that space. Keith was a, and I'm assuming still is, a master of that. And we needed that to really round out our team because there were a lot of people even back then who just had absolutely no social media presence or online presence or anything. So we needed to essentially call into a company and break down the phone tree and the directory and all that. And this was a very specific skill that Keith had. So those are the two things I was like, wow, this person's really going to round out our team. And man, was I right. He ended up being actually one of our top performers and moved on to do some really great things in other places. But I'm going to come back to the music thing and say this one thing. One of the secrets, or maybe it's not a secret, maybe it's a well-known fact and I just didn't know about it, about music is that there's a lot of math in music. Math and engineering. And so we found that there was a connection between people who were either good at music or had music ability, reading music and composing and things like that, and people who were coders. Now, I don't know if that's continued to this day, but Keith, tell us a little bit about the connection between music and engineering, software engineering.

Well, yes, it's very interesting. There are a lot of engineers and technical people that are musical, that have played in their life or still do, and they may have studied music as a kid or they still play. I actually was working with a hiring manager, a director of engineering who was an accomplished jazz pianist. And we used to geek out about, you know, jazz harmony and music. But there are similarities because, you know, coding is, you know, dealing with a language, whether it's C++ or Go or Python. And music is definitely a language too. And but it's interesting, in music there are rules, but breaking the rules sometimes can be okay. And I would think that that holds true in technology as well. But I think one of the things that I really found that I enjoyed in my early days of recruiting, I would, you know, get in contact, engage a candidate and find out that they're musical and they love music. And we would just develop this, um, rapport and bond. And of course, if you bond with a candidate, that, that can be right there. That's the best thing in the world.

That's what it's all about.

Yeah, that's cool.

Absolutely. And then you can help find the right job for them and, you know, make that match that maybe nobody else would have made, and that connection and everything. So, um, so you used music as a bridge between, you know, the recruiting call and kind of that establishing that rapport. And that was one of the reasons, among several others, that you were really successful in, you know, breaking ground with recruiting female engineers at the time. I want to kind of pull on that thread a little bit and ask you about what are some of the challenges specifically to targeting a demographic, and since all we were working on was gender demographic, what were some of the biggest challenges that you remember overcoming around diversity sourcing and diversity recruiting back then? We're talking about, gosh, what was this, 16, 17, 18 years ago? Diversity wasn't a fad, diversity wasn't cool, diversity wasn't something people even really talked a whole lot about. So what were some of the big things you overcame to be successful at that job?

Well, back in those days, I think Google had just gone public right around then.

Yep, I started before they went public and then you started right after they, yep.

Right, right. And, but at that point, Google still was not the household word that it is now, household name. And, uh, some female technologists that I engaged with had been working for big companies for quite a few years, like IBM, HP, HP Labs, you know, Microsoft Labs, even, uh, Bell Labs, AT&T Bell Labs, where there was a lot of innovation And they were used to the stability, if you will, of a large, right, large, well-known company. And why would they want to go to work for this, you know, disruptive company called Google? It's a search engine, and they may not have understood the technology and the business model.

How do you make money, right? How do you make money on it?

Yeah, how do you make money?

Exactly.

And it was before ad tech was just exploding. So that was one of the challenges. I think what I found is female technologists were more— they were looking more for stability and longevity in their career. And so we had to really sell them on Google's culture and really sell how much they embraced diversity, um, which in the future, you know, the future potential, the trajectory the company was on.

Sure, right, which nobody really knew. I mean, even we didn't know, but we were very secure in the fact that this was going somewhere because of the rapid growth and the investment internally. And some things we couldn't really talk about openly that were, um, you know, confidential that they were working on, but we still had to communicate that somehow. And, you know, carry over the experience of, hey, this is not some startup that's going to be disappearing or sure, it's not a 35-year-old company that's established, but.

Right.

You know, we want you to come in here and make a difference and make a change and bring in, modernize them and, you know, bring them into the, into the diversity age, so to speak. So and what we're, you know, at the risk of being stereotypical, which we are not trying to do, keep in mind, this was 2004. You know, things have changed a lot in work life and environment and equality and inclusion and all that. But back then, there were definitely some stereotypes that held up. Like, for example, like you said, female engineers in general were more interested in long-term career development and specifically who they would be working with, like who their team would be. And male engineers tended to be more interested in like, what am I going to be working on? And less risk-averse, right?

Yeah.

Well, one of the other problems that we encountered was with regard to that, who am I going to be working with? Because at the time, the interview panel process was comprised of engineers that would not necessarily and very likely not would be at all involved in that candidate's career. They were just selected from a panel of a pool of interviewers and were supposed to give, you know, constructive points on this candidate. So the, the engineer, the women engineers would, you know, go to the interview and then ask us questions like, well, who am I going to be working with? And we would have to say, well, we don't know. You know, we, we make hiring decisions and then we assign you. So they were always concerned that, well, wait, so all the people that I met, none of those people are going to be my manager. Yeah, possibly. Right. Do you remember that? How did you overcome that?

Well, I think we would talk about the opportunity for career growth, and you may not know who your team is going to be at this point, but that, that's an illustration of how much movement, lateral movement and upward movement was available within the organization. And Google was quite innovative there, the way they managed their teams. And so we would sell that innovation, people innovation, if you will, and also the fact that they really champion female technologists and they're really looking for female leaders to influence and help build the company. And also throwing out statistics and information that Google had gathered, whereas they had found that organizations led by female CEOs and executives tended to do better sometimes than male-led organizations. So we utilized that information, and I think we were able to overcome that objection to, hey, What team am I going to work on?

Right. Well, whatever. Really, you know, you'll work on several teams. It's a stable job and you'll be— yeah, that's a, that's a good point. The other objection that I remember that we had a really hard time with overcoming was until we actually, like, learned our lesson the hard way, or at least maybe I did. I don't know if maybe you knew better than I did because, you know, you certainly were one of the top performers. But I remember that Google had set out to increase the perks or benefits and in an effort to appeal to female engineers, to women engineers at the time, because a lot of the perks that were there were, you know, it was a young company, so they were more— they circled around young engineers that are just graduating from college and they wanted things with like on-campus activities that assisted them with their day-to-day lives.

Yeah.

So I remember when they introduced— this is just one of those learning opportunities, right? They introduced a daycare center, right? And they were like, okay, now we have a daycare center. And they asked us, you might not remember this part, but they asked me to start including this in our messaging to, you know, recruit engineers. And mind you, our messaging did not have anything gender-specific. We never reached out to people and said, "Hi, I'm reaching out to you because you're a woman." I mean, that wasn't it at all. We were just focused on sourcing female and, you know, gender-based candidates to increase the funnel because it was a very male-dominated inbox incoming flow. And so in order to combat that very male-dominated applicant pool, we had to increase that. But they wanted us to reach out to candidates and talk about that. And I made a couple of calls and very quickly realized that this was a bad idea. Now, you know, I plead ignorance. I didn't know any better. I didn't have any children at the time. And, you know, I'd only been recruiting for what, '96 to 2004, about 8 years. Right? So I remember talking on the phone with a very strong candidate, and they raised the issue of, right, who am I going to be working with and what's my career path? And, you know, seems like a young company. We did— we hardly even had much of an HR department at the time. And, um, so I was selling this candidate on, you know, the future potential and the benefits, and I dropped the line of, and we just put in a daycare center that, you know, if you have kids, should make it easier for you to, you know, be able to keep up with your responsibilities and everything. This candidate said in a somewhat irritated tone, but not angry, just more like an adult talking to a child that doesn't know better. They said, well, what, Shelly, what makes you think that as a parent I would want to put my child in a car and drive an hour and a half to the office to put them in daycare at the office? And I was like, oh, I never, I never thought of that. You know, as soon as she said that, it hit me. I'm like, yeah. I immediately responded back and I said, I'm sure you already have a daycare center and I'm sure it's close to home. And I'm like, you probably would never want to expose your child to being locked into a car seat. Um, I was assuming that was a small child because, you know, right, the whole daycare thing and everything, uh, being locked into their car seat and putting them at risk in traffic and all that. And she's like, yeah, absolutely right. I don't want to be, you know, it's, it's not fun to have It's not fun to be a child and locked into your car seat every day at that time and, you know, in traffic and everything. And then she said, and I don't, I don't want to expose them to any risk. But then the other thing that she said, which really hit home for me, Keith, was she also said, and what makes you think I'm the one that takes the kid to daycare?

All right. Oh, okay, okay.

I was like, I actually never thought, I never, I never assumed, uh, I'm just telling that we have daycare, but I can see how you wouldn't, you know, how anyone would want to drive a long way to go to daycare. So, you know, that doesn't make any sense. So we quickly learned not to use— it was a list of perks and we had it in the list of perks, but male or female parents did not really want, you know, that unless they were close to the office. So did you ever run into you know, interesting objections from female candidates that were, that were like very different to what you expected?

Well, that, that story, Shelly, goes into the fact that recruiting and dealing with people and their career aspirations in their life, it's highly personal and it can be highly emotional, emotionally charged. So you definitely hit a button with that particular candidate, although quite possibly another female candidate would not have reacted that way.

Exactly.

It was really interesting.

It opened my eyes, though, to the fact that it was a little one-sided to think about daycare as a benefit for a particular gender.

Right. True, true. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess to be inclusive, we would want to offer that to both genders.

Yeah. And I think later on Google realized that it wasn't a benefit that was utilized a lot because people had, you know, they wanted daycares close to home and people that they had worked with before and trusted and their friends had kids in that daycare and all that. So it quickly became less of a priority. Are there any other just, you know, unusual objections that you encountered?

Well, not so much objections, but when it comes to career, trajectory, like, say, a female software engineer who's out of school, you know, 3 to 5 years, and say that they're— they may be married but not have any kids yet. And their plan might be to start a family, you know, and of course, having kids, that, that kind of changes your life trajectory. And I had found that some female technologists decided they wanted to get out of software engineering and maybe go more into product or, or, or a different career trajectory.

Less linear career. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Because factoring the family into it, that, that's an issue. And that's, that's an issue that I think male candidates don't really think about as much, or it's not as much of an issue. So it's like, do you want to stay? You want to continue to be a software engineer, or, or are your career plans to go in other, you know, product or business or leadership, other directions?

Interesting. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, I want to switch up a little bit before we run out of time here and talk about the other really juicy bit.

A lot to talk about.

Yeah, there is a lot. We might have to bring you back in Um, the other thing I wanted to ask you about were— and don't spill any, you know, trade secrets here or anything like that, but one of the absolute best candidates that, that you would bring in, or one of the, one of the best type of candidates that you would bring in, were people that were just simply not visible online. And, um, you had a very special skill set of being able to You know, I would, I would hand you a lead, name, phone number, email, or somebody else on the research team would hand you a lead and you would basically take that one lead and turn it into 100. How the heck did you do that? Like, can you give us anything that's not trade secret?

Well, I think it gets down to networking. You know, you—

that's what I mean. But I mean, you just, you took one person and Like, how?

Boy, that's, that's a tough question. I think, you know, I came up the old school way, you know, developing relationships, developing strong relationships. And I, I think people who like you, they, they want to help you, you know. If you have a relationship, I think the natural human instinct is for us to help each other. So if you form a really good bond with a candidate and they know that you have their back and you're looking out for their best interest, you might not have an opportunity for them at, at this present time. They might say, hey, why don't you call so-and-so over here? And oh, by the way, this, this company I was talking to, they're— they may be having some layoffs. And I have a couple of friends that I went to college with and You know, it snowballs from that. And so at the end of the day, I think it all gets back to relationships and, you know, letting each and every candidate, potential candidate that you work with— you may not have a position, they may not get hired, but if you develop those relationships, they can be golden. And I see it. I practice that. To this day.

So I hear that. And what the first thing that comes to mind is, you know, for people out there that have the ability and the gift of forming a bond with their candidates on the phone, they might have an intuitive ability to do that, or they might have learned it from practice, or they might have been, you know, there might be old school or trained by someone that was old school, if you will. But there has to be a question that you asked to like maybe elicit referrals? Like, you know, because you and I both know that the question, who do you know, is pretty much a dead end, right? Who do you know? Oh, nobody, right? So what was there a question or a couple of questions that you can give our viewers as a takeaway? Like, you know, when you're talking to somebody and you've connected with them and asked them for or established some rapport, here's how you segue into like getting names or asking for referrals. Do you have any tricks that are not tricks because this is not a trick, but do you have any advice on how to ask that question?

Well, I'd say knowing, knowing your candidate, doing some research into their background and, you know, bringing up anecdotal information from their background. Hey, I see you worked for IBM Research, you know, and boy, that's a very prestigious team. That must have been really exciting. You know, I can see you're very well connected. You know, I would love to help out anybody within your network that might be looking. And also, you know, frankly, if you could help point me in the right direction You know, asking for help, I think, is— can be very effective because, like I said, people like to help each other. Professionals like to help each other. As a matter of fact, I often cite this to candidates that are individual contributors, ICs. You know, I tell them, you know, I've worked with many C-level executives and they're the most forthcoming. They will turn you on to their network if they like you. They will tell you their comp information. They will tell you everything. You know, they're, they're the most transparent. And I'm sure you have found that, Shelly. The higher you, you go on the food chain, so to speak, the more transparent those people are and willing to network. So if I have a candidate that's kind of resistant to share comp information and stuff like that, I'll start talking about that. You know, well, the execs, they're very open and, you know, that's how they got to be where they are, you know?

So that's a really good one. I like that one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you essentially didn't ask, you shared information, and that sharing opened them up to sharing rather than using some kind of, I don't know, psychology trick to get them to share. You actually were providing them with a nugget of wisdom that they would then go, oh, I appreciate that. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And then they would open up. That's smart. I like that.

It's kind of a quid pro quo kind of a thing. Yeah, I did. I was reading something on sales and the author was saying that the hard close doesn't really work. Anymore. Like, you want to talk on Tuesday or Wednesday? You know, the alternative choice close and the who do you know? Because people don't like to be closed. You know, that, that car sales mentality doesn't work anymore. So, you know, it's— it all gets down to the relationship.

That's powerful. Yeah. Sadly, I think, you know, some of that's kind of lost now because there's so much pressure on, on, on us on time. And, you know, there's fewer of us to do more hiring. And so we really don't have the bandwidth to establish those strong relationships with candidates like we did in the past. But I think what you're saying is that you don't have the time to not do that. I know that's a double negative, but it sounds like doing that gets you more than, than, than just kind of increasing your volume.

Well, it's interesting. That can go into the, the offer acceptance stage when you, when you get to the point, if you've developed that bond with the candidate, that person is probably more likely to accept. So not only you know, from a full cycle recruiting, taking it all the way to offer and acceptance, hopefully you're not only developing the bond, but you're also qualifying, you know, the candidate. Like, is this person a reasonable human being? You know, are they, are they a nice person? Do they seem relationship-oriented? Because, you know, if, if you're not seeing that, those red flags can jump out at you at out at you. And you can, you can also utilize that relationship process to weed out the ones that aren't going to be— aren't going to accept or not get to the offer stage.

So it's kind of holding back something.

Okay, wrong approach. Yeah, but you know, I think the relationship thing can be done quickly, you know, in today's high volume environment, right?

Just by being open and sharing your own information, I think is what you're saying. Not that it's that simple, but, you know, give the— give something to get something. Yeah.

And I think it's more of a consultative approach, which I like. I've always enjoyed that. I, I admire people, you know, if someone is trying to recruit me into a position and they're— they seem to be generally interested, genuinely interested in developing a relationship, it's like, yeah, cool, cool.

I know we have a lot more stuff to talk about, but we're, we're at the half-hour point here. So I would like to do is I heard that you're open to new opportunities setting up for next year. So if anybody's out there interested in hiring someone with some real skills. I definitely can vouch for you.

And thank you.

They can call me for a reference, but you can check out Keith Silverman on LinkedIn. And if you're interested in the jazz blues side of Keith Silverman, then go to keithandrew.com.

keithandrew.com and Keith Andrew on Spotify.

The alter ego of Keith Silverman.

Yes. And serenading candidates with my guitar. Proves to be very effective too.

Also works, right? Let me play you a live song right now. Yeah, yeah, insert their name into the lyrics and— yeah, awesome. Well, dude, I would love to have you back next year. Yeah. Um, so thanks very much for coming. Everybody have a happy holiday season. Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, everything that— all the fun stuff that's coming up. New Year's, and of course, Happy New Year 2023, and we will see you on here next Okay, happy New Year, happy holidays, everybody. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.